The
Bulwark Built a Profitable $20 Million Business by Breaking the Old Media Rules
What began as a Never Trump passion
project has become a fast-growing media company with more than 140,000 paid
subscribers.
BY ROB
WALKER
Aug 6, 2026
From a cramped room in
an uptown New Orleans neighborhood, stuffed with a fancy video lighting setup
and decorated with a plant and a pinto bean poster, Tim Miller has become
arguably the most familiar public face of an unlikely sounding media business success
story. The Bulwark Daily podcast, which the former
political operative hosts from his home far from the D.C.-New York
political-media epicenter, features guests like journalist Maggie Haberman,
pundit Piers Morgan, and former transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg, along
with Miller’s own at-times performative brand of partisan commentary. One
memorable example: Unable to air a clip of Vice President JD Vance being booed
at the Olympics, Miller recreated the moment himself. (“Boooo! You suck!”
etc.)
Miller’s show ranks
consistently in the top 10 news podcasts, putting its anti-MAGA (but avowedly
centrist) agenda in the company of Megyn Kelly’s, Candace Owens’s, and Tucker
Carlson’s MAGA-friendlier offerings; the video version anchors a YouTube channel with more than 1.7 million
followers.
The Bulwark, a media company founded in 2018 by apostate
Republicans as a Never Trump redoubt, is much more than Miller’s show these
days, with more than 50 employees publishing 10 newsletters and nine podcasts,
mostly free but some available only with a subscription (annual price: $100).
The subject matter ranges from national security to business to entertainment.
Live events have been added to the mix, with shows that basically consist of
Bulwark personalities chatting and arguing about the news, selling out in major
cities, and sometimes requiring second nights.
This bundle gives
subscribers multiple reasons to stay, and it lets the Bulwark capture different
audiences. A subscriber who came into the Bulwarkverse via Miller’s podcast
might discover Lauren Egan’s Democratic politics newsletter. A reader of Will
Sommer’s entertaining coverage of MAGA conspiracy culture may find their way to
Sarah Longwell’s more nitty-gritty (and, for Trump opponents, depressing) Focus Group podcast. All will be
teased with subscriber-only extras for those who can’t get enough. Editor
Jonathan V. Last’s Triad newsletter — five days a
week and often 2,000 words a shot — has turned out to be a major converter of
paid subscribers.
“I think that one of our
projects has been to rebuild the bundle,” says Last, referring to the
unbundling of news organizations and rise of individual star writers and
creators who use platforms like Substack to go solo. (A recent redesign of its
site emphasizes a more cohesive, magazine-like feel.) “I think we are much more
than the sum of our parts. We bring together a bigger audience, build a bigger
community because we’re all together than any of us would on our own. And I
think there’s a lot of value in that for the people who read us and listen to
us and talk with us and a lot of value for us as people who are on a mission
and not just trying to make money.”
But the telegenic,
44-year-old Miller, who sometimes sports a single strand of pearls, has become
a kind of face for the brand as it has made its surprising rise from a modest
nonprofit to a growing and profitable business with annual revenue topping $20
million last year — and on track to reach about $30 million this
year. It recently passed one million total Substack subscribers and more than
140,000 paid. It has more than 1.7 million followers on YouTube, where Miller’s
podcast has had 71 million views in the past year.
Most of the growth has
happened in the past two years or so, and for a variety of reasons, from being
opportunistic about branching out into new media to staying conservative and
deliberate in their growth strategy.
But one that Miller likes to emphasize is the authentic voice. “People ask,
‘What is authenticity and what is tone?’” Miller told me recently. “And
sometimes it’s hard to describe it, but I would say I’m mad about what’s
happening. I’m actually mad.”
That’s not enough to
turn a political mission into a company, but it’s a start. And it’s fair to say
that the key players in the Bulwarkverse, most notably publisher and founder
Longwell and editor Last, are actually mad too, and not hesitant to say so. Certainly
none of them were motivated to pursue the Bulwark project as a cool-headed plan
to build a profitable new-media brand.
The company began as a
passion project by founders who saw the rise of President Trump as bad for the
Republican Party and the conservative cause, and for America. Longwell had
essentially no background in publishing, and by her own account has instead largely
run the business on intuition and opportunism. But clearly she understands
communications — and suspects it may have helped to come from outside
traditional media. “My North Star is not to recreate the failing model,” she
says.
And what that really
adds up to is a combination of embracing instinct and openness to
experimentation. The Bulwark has built a new kind of ideological media company
with a series of fortuitous decisions, starting with figuring out how to reward
its fans.
A great hang
The Bulwark is a
near-direct descendant of The Weekly Standard,
the neoconservative magazine co-founded by pundit and political veteran Bill
Kristol. This in turn descended from a long tradition of smaller-circulation
magazines of politics and policy ideas (notably including The Public Interest, founded by Kristol’s father,
Irving) that sometimes achieved genuine influence, but didn’t attract a mass
audience, often depending on a wealthy patron to stay afloat. The Standard, which staked out a conservative
anti-Trump stance during and after the 2016 election, was unceremoniously shuttered in
2018 by parent Clarity Media, owned by the conservative billionaire Philip
Anschutz.
Longwell, who had spent
much of her career doing communications strategy for clients of conservative PR
firm Berman and Company, had become increasingly focused on opposing Trump —
especially as much of the Republican establishment reversed its initial Trump
resistance and fell in line. She and Kristol, among those who saw Trump as an
authoritarian threat to the American system, launched the first version of the
Bulwark as essentially a Drudge Report-style Never Trump news and opinion
aggregator.
Last, a Standard veteran who had built the magazine’s
digital presence, agreed to help get the Bulwark up and running. (He intended
to leave political journalism after that; the demise of The Weekly Standard had left him cynical, and
mad.) He imagined a new iteration of the small political magazines he’d grown
up in. “We can build a little website that is a digital home for ideas,” he
recalls thinking at the time. Longwell helped create Defending Democracy Together
Institute, a nonprofit that funded the Bulwark, raising money from donors,
basically the usual tradition of public-idea media, but on WordPress. (Longwell
left Berman and Company but started Longwell Partners, a political
communications firm with an emphasis on focus group analysis. Her book drawing
lessons from that research, How to Eat an Elephant,
comes out in September.)
Even this early version
of the site, with regular contributions from Kristol and Last and the original
podcast (hosted by Charlie Sykes), found an enthusiastic audience, who, to the
founders’ surprise, wanted to chip in. This inspired the site’s first intuitive
evolution: It switched to a for-profit model in 2020, moving its written
content to Substack, and launching a few new products for paid subscribers.
JVL, as he became known to fans, was sticking around, but his ambitions were
modest. At best, he expected 7,000 paid subscriptions in six months; it got
12,000 in roughly two months, and Longwell believed it could go much higher.
“Sarah understood much, much sooner,” he says.
To this day, most
Bulwark content is free. The company takes a minimalist approach to pay-walling
on the theory that subscribers are paying for an extra dose of community, not a
product or service. This stems from the original idea that content like The Secret Podcast — featuring Longwell and Last,
talking, arguing, and laughing about current political events — could be a
bonus product that “engaged” with paid subscribers, “as a thank you,” Longwell
says. “That sort of became the core of the subscription model that ultimately
now is our business model.”
Meanwhile, Longwell had
reached out to her old friend Miller. A veteran of the failed presidential
campaigns of Jon Huntsman and Jeb Bush, and outspoken foe of Trumpism, Miller
started contributing written pieces. When Sykes departed, Miller became host of
the flagship podcast. “We were confident that he would do well,” Longwell says.
“I don’t know that we foresaw that it was going to go this well.”
Miller’s journey — from
GOP insider to apostate to not simply a Never Trumper but something like a
left-adjacent independent — is the story some chunk of The Bulwark’s audience
has been living, making him a particularly credible narrator of the moment, at
least for his devoted audience. But he’s also able to transcend any single
niche narrative. He’s a veteran cable news contributor, yet his ability to be
funny, self-deprecating, and genuinely conversational on camera distinguishes
him from the shouting heads vibe. Miller is a prepared, attentive interviewer
who is quick on his feet, but Longwell emphasizes his tone: Yes, he’s mad, but
he’s funny and charming. “He’s just a great hang,” she says.
And that’s as good a
summary as any of what the Bulwark brand has become. The site publishes serious
analysis and reporting, but particularly on some of its podcasts, there’s a
lighter touch, too. Miller and Longwell have a running argument over Trump’s gilded
makeover of the Oval Office (Miller, curiously, defends it), and both get
showily exasperated with “dark JVL’s” pessimism about voters ever turning on
MAGA. There’s also plenty of mocking coverage of the antics of MAGA extremists
like Laura Loomer. Politics can be tough, and there’s no way to sugarcoat it,
Longwell says, but “we’re going to make it fun” — and conversational and
communal and the opposite of despair.
Turning on the cameras
When it comes to the
actual business of the Bulwark, Longwell stresses that she’s taken a
bootstrapped approach. (You might even call it conservative.) In 2024, Semafor reported
that Kathryn Murdoch, the wife of media scion James, and Reid Hoffman, the
LinkedIn co-founder, had made small investments to cover early shortfalls. The
company broke even in 2025, and despite offers, Longwell says the company has
taken on no further investment and is otherwise employee-owned with no plans to
sell.
A large part of that
success is due to another simple, intuitive decision. As Longwell says, “We
turned on the cameras.” That is, they began adding video versions of their
podcasts to YouTube in 2023 — standard procedure now, but an experiment at the
time, suggested by Longwell Partners employees who believed YouTube was key to
the future of political persuasion. Miller also began contributing his own
direct-to-camera takes on current news, in a way that felt less like
professional news and more like a smart friend explaining things over a
FaceTime; some were excerpted as social media-friendly shorts.
People were starting to
treat YouTube as a news source, and the platform was already saturated with
both right-wing and hard-left content. “But the center-left news and opinion
kind of space that we occupy, there just wasn’t a lot out there,” Miller says.
And the Bulwark spoke to them in addition to its GOP refugee audience. “There
was a ton of demand on YouTube for anti-Trump, center-left content and there
was not a ton of supply. We were kind of in the right place at the right time.”
In the summer of 2024,
when President Biden withdrew from the presidential race and the American
political atmosphere became electric with uncertainty, the Bulwark had a
perfunctory YouTube account with roughly 278,000 followers. By late September,
it had grown to 631,000 subscribers. The video platform was soon generating
between $200,000 and $300,000 a month from advertising. More important, it had
become a discovery engine funneling a whole new audience toward paid Substack
subscriptions.
The Bulwark has since
doubled down on video, adding a “Bulwark Takes” feed in which various
contributors respond to events throughout the day (racking up some 226 million
views in the past year), and livestreamed commentary on coverage of events like
presidential addresses. As with the adoption of Substack, none of this requires
heavy investment dollars or time-consuming development processes; it just
utilizes free, turn-key tools.
Life after Trump
To annoy the Bulwark’s
principals, ask whether the company has a post-Trump future; you won’t be the
first. Their bet is that the Bulwark community can be built to last beyond the
current administration, but that project can’t be rushed. And of course, they
have heard the comparisons. Crooked Media, the home of Pod Save America, has more than 100 employees, and its
hosts are reportedly paid $28
million. The Free Press, Bari Weiss’s contrarian-conservative Substack-based
publication, grew to more than 170,000 paid subscribers before being acquired
by Paramount Skydance in 2025 for a reported $150 million. That acquisition put
a number on what a successful subscription-based opinion publication can be
worth, a surprising number to some observers.